Rackspace Cloud Files Adds New Control Features

Rackspace is excited to announce a set of new features in Cloud Files that allow you to have more control of your content. All of these features are now available for both U.S. and U.K. Cloud Files API customers and can be found in our developers’ guide here.

Expiring Objects

The new expiring objects feature lets you set an expiration or retention period on your objects. For each object, you now have the ability to set (via headers) a retention period based on a date (i.e. 3/31/13) or a length of time (i.e. 360 seconds). As soon as the object’s expiration period is up, the object will become inaccessible and deleted from Cloud Files. Any CDN-enabled files will live out their time-to-live (TTL). If you don’t need or want to keep Cloud Files objects indefinitely (e.g. log files or recurring full backups), this new feature is for you.

Temporary URLs

This new Cloud Files feature allows you to create temporary URLs that give direct access to your Cloud Files objects for a specified period of time. Temporary URLs allow you to sign URLs based on keys that you set. This means that you can now grant access to your content or an end user’s content without CDN-enabling the file. Temporary URLs can help prevent your content from being abused and from incurring unintended bandwidth fees. Ideal use cases include developers designing file managers or applications that allow users to share files

Form Post

Lastly, form post is another way Cloud Files is improving your user experience for developing file-sharing applications. Similar to temporary URLs, form post enables you to give your users a signature to include in their URLs. With that signed URL, end users can upload directly to Cloud Files using their browser without having to upload to an intermediary server owned by a control panel.

If you have any questions about these features or any other Cloud Files questions, please contact our Fanatical Support team or just ask them here!

9 COMMENTS

In your post about SSL there was mentioned that with TempUrls you were also considering using Referrer restrictions for limiting access. Can I hope that you’re still planning to add this feature? Thanks!

@Nick- We are definitely still looking at Referrer Restrictions. The biggest challenge right now is that Akamai does them for direct customers, but has not developed them for customers of customers. Because Cloud Files is Akamai’s direct customer, our users aren’t yet able to set referrer restrictions on their content. (And we obviously don’t’ want to set them globally)

Akamai has been crystal clear with us that this is a high priority for them, and we hope to see it in 2013. We’ll turn it around for our customers after some integration work and testing by Rackspace.